Oriental Studies (Apr 2021)
The Functioning of the Verbal Hesitation Marker Ni / Nei ‘Whatchamacallit’ in Oral Monologues of Bashkirs: A Case Study of Bashkir Dialectal Texts
Abstract
The article studies the functioning of the verbal hesitation marker ni / nei ‘whatchamacallit’ in Bashkir spontaneous speech. Goals. The research aims to analyze and identify the main functions of the investigated hesitation marker in the process of organizing spontaneous discourse. Materials and Methods. The study explores dialectal materials included in the text database of the dialectological cluster within the Digital Corpus (lit. ‘Machine Fund’) of the Bashkir Language (https://mfbl2.ru). The total of the studied materials is 209 dialectal texts. The database contains 718 tokens of the investigated hesitation marker. The selection of examples for analysis was carried out through the method of continuous sampling. The employed research methods are those of discourse and contextual analysis, as well as the statistical method. Results. Asemantization of the basic meaning of the interrogative pronoun in spontaneous speech results in the emergence of a pragmatic meaning, and the lexeme begins to function as a filler for hesitational pauses. The multifunctionality of this hesitation marker is confirmed by numerous examples of its use. In spontaneous speech, the verbal hesitation marker performs the hesitative (fills in pauses in speech production), discursive (as a means to organize speech) and search (temporary substitutions in search for a speech unit corresponding to the original intention) functions. The uniqueness of this hesitation marker is that in spontaneous speech it can replace any notional word that one has ‘on the tip of the tongue’ and, thus, help avoid the occurrence of long pauses or interruptions in utterances. The analysis of materials reveals the main methods of correcting problem areas in speech production. Being a characteristic attribute of spontaneous speech, the lexemes can also be stylistically used in fiction works as instruments to reveal the author’s intention — depicting a psychological portrait of the character through the latter’s speech features.
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